SCHAEFFER LAKE was an hour from Mason Falls. I’d stopped by and grabbed Purvis, who’d promptly fallen asleep in the back seat of the truck. As I got closer, I thought through the details of the old case.
In 1993, twenty-six-year-old Brian Menasco had been picked up along the side of Highway 908, disoriented and wandering in burnt clothes. With a forty-acre fire nearby, he’d been arrested for arson.
When Junius’s body was found two days later, the arson was upgraded to arson-murder. A trial followed, with the jury out for only eight hours.
My GPS told me I’d arrived at the Menascos, and I slowed my F-150 outside of a gray ranch-style home with paint peeling off the trim.
Through the pines to the right of the place, I could make out the greenish-blue water of the lake behind it.
Schaeffer Lake was half natural lake and half reservoir, created by the completion of the Stanley Dam in the 1950s. It was popular with boaters and jet skiers, and had over a hundred finger inlets rich with largemouth bass and bluegill.
I rang the doorbell, but no one came. After a minute, I saw a faded sign below the bell that directed packages to the lake side of the house. I threaded through a trail of weeds and found myself along a dirt shore. The property was overgrown, but even larger than I’d guessed from the street. A sprawling six acres, set along an inlet in the lake.
A wooden dock jutted out into the water. A man sat on a lawn chair.
“Hello there,” I hollered.
The man was in his seventies and wore a checkered blue flannel.
I moved closer, walking onto the dock. It was made of cedar, and the decades had turned the wood gray, the water rotting it from below and the sun bleaching it from above. The dock had no railings around it, and you could walk right off into the water.
“I’m looking for William Menasco.”
“You found him,” he said. The look on his face was somewhere between “Who the hell are you” and “Who gives a shit.”
“P. T. Marsh.” I put out my hand.
The old guy didn’t shake but pointed at a chair nearby. He was skinny, full of wrinkles, and had jeans hiked a good three inches above his waist.
“You some real estater, P.T.?” he asked. “’Cause I ain’t selling.”
I smiled, shaking my head. Far out on the lake, I saw a man standing on a paddleboard. The water was calm, and the man had an oar in one hand.
I flashed Menasco some tin. “I’m a detective, sir. I wanted to talk to you about your son, Brian.”
The old guy’s look turned to annoyance. He had small dark eyes, set closer together than an earthworm’s. “Brian’s done passed,” he said. “Twenty years ago next month.”
“I know,” I said.
“He wasn’t in no shape to go to prison,” the father said. “It’s a community of its own, you know.”
I cocked my head, not exactly sure what that meant.
“You gotta get on with everybody,” Menasco clarified. “Or you get fuckin’ killed. Brian never got on with no one.”
Menasco reached down to a red Igloo beside his chair. The kind that held a single six-pack. He took the can of Bud that he’d just finished and tossed it out into the water. Grabbed another one.
“You fuckers charged my boy with conspiracy.” He looked over at me. “You ever heard of a man who can’t make no friends being charged with conspiracy?”
I didn’t answer him. Out on the lake, the man on the paddleboard leaned over and jabbed with his oar into the water. Maybe he was fishing and it was a spear.
“I work in Mason Falls, Mr. Menasco. Do you know the area?”
He took a deep pull on his new Budweiser. “I drove a truck for thirty years. You blindfold me, and I’ll find Mason Falls and half the other shit towns in this state.”
“I’m looking into a murder that has some similarities to the one that your son went to prison for,” I said. “I’ve got a black kid who was kidnapped and burned to death. He was fifteen, and his elbows were broken.”
Menasco put down his beer, and I noticed an empty can of potted meat beside his chair, a plastic fork inside it. My daddy used to call the stuff redneck caviar.
“We had a suspect we liked for the crime,” I said. “He’s an ex-con, and looks good for it, but I don’t think he did it.”
Menasco turned. “Is that supposed to make me think you’re the good guy? You’re the cop who would’ve helped my son out if you were here back then?”
“No, sir.”
“I don’t know nothing about Mason Falls and a kid there,” Menasco said.
“The local cops in Shonus,” I said. “Did they look at anyone else back in ’93—other than your son? Anyone who’d still be alive? I got their case file, but it’s pretty thin. Maybe you heard rumors.”
“Brian was a firebug since he was a kid,” the old man said. “But he was gentle like his momma. I couldn’t never take him fishing on account of him being so damn squeamish about hooking a shrimp for bait. He was a loner, but if you got the match out of his hand, he was harmless.”
“So the broken elbows on Junius Lochland . . .”
Menasco shook his head. “At first, the papers made my boy into some evil genius—and violent. Then they come to their senses. Realized that Brian couldn’t never have done that. So at the trial they changed their story. Brian just knocked Junius out. The fire broke them arms.”
I thought about my conversation with Beaudin, the M.E., about the two different reports. Beaudin’s original thought was that Junius was tortured.
“So no other suspects that you know of?” I asked.
He shrugged. “No.”
“Mr. Menasco, does the word ‘StormCloud’ mean anything? They’re a neo-Nazi group.”
“I just done told you my son wasn’t like that, Marsh. Half the guys I drove with were black. We played cards at my house every month.”
“What about a family called Hester?” I asked. “They owned the land where Brian was picked up.”
“Everyone knows Hester Peaches,” he said. “So what?”
I stared at the old coot. I was running out of options, and I couldn’t go back to Mason Falls empty-handed. Berry was probably looking at a sketch of me right now.
“Mr. Menasco,” I said, “Brian had a public defender. Is there a reason you didn’t hire a lawyer?”
Menasco pointed around. Almost smiling. “You mean why didn’t I cash all this in to help my boy?”
I nodded.
“It didn’t exist then,” Menasco said. “The jury went into their room to talk, and the city attorney told us it’d probably be a day or two. My momma was sick, so I drove up to Kentucky to see her. I took her to play the ponies. Walked out two hours later with $1.5 million.”
A crack inside my brain like thunder. “What?”
“Back-to-back superfectas,” he said. “ I took the winnings from the first race and rolled it into the next.”
I shook my head. The odds on getting the first four horses in the right order was insane. Doing it two races in a row—impossible.
“This was the same day Brian was sentenced?” I asked.
He nodded. “I tried to use the cash on an attorney for my boy, but it was useless. By the time I had the money in hand, the public defender had told Brian to admit to killing Junius, to get a lighter sentence. There was no going back from that.”
The old guy finished his beer and did the same trick, tossing the can out into the lake.
We watched the empty take on water, slowly sinking to the bottom, where I was guessing there were about five hundred other cans of Bud. Maybe some Miller High Lifes. Some cans of Schlitz.
Life was full of ironies. Strange reversals of fortune. Coming into money a day late was Menasco’s. But hearing his story four hours after talking to Unger about his windfall from the broadband fiber—it was too much, even to a cynic like me.
I stood up. “I’m sorry about your son, Mr. Menasco.”
“There’s no giving it back, Marsh. When you get the luck.”
I squinted at him. It was an odd phrasing—“the luck.” But it wasn’t just that.
It was the same expression that drunk Bernard Kane had said to me in the jail cell.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
But Menasco just shrugged, opening his cooler for another beer.
I stared hard at him. “You said ‘the luck.’”
“I don’t gotta talk to you, pig.”
I knocked the can of beer out of Menasco’s hand. Leaned over and grabbed him by his flannel, my hands near his neck. “I’m in a fight for my life here, you old fuck. You said ‘the luck.’ Now explain.”
Menasco’s eyes were big. “There was this old boy who ran the freight dock at work,” he said. “He was a real prejudiced motherfucker. Never talked to me ’til Brian was charged. Then he’d come by like we was best friends. He told me it was gonna happen before it did.”
“He told you about Brian and the fire—before it happened?”
“No, no. He told me I was gonna win at the racetrack before I did. Said I was chosen to get ‘the luck.’ For what Brian had done. He’s the one who said it that way.”
“Chosen by whom?”
“I dunno.” Menasco shrugged. “He babbled about some group. The Order. He told me the day before I won the money, Don’t be afraid to play the cards or the ponies. Buy a lotto ticket. Put down a wild bet. You’ll find that the scales get evened up. That the Order takes care of you.”
A lotto ticket? Purvis said inside my head.
Someone from Harmony had won the lottery the day of Kendrick’s murder.
I let go of Menasco’s shirt.
“He called it ‘the Order’?”
The old guy nodded slowly.
“This was some group here in Shonus?”
“I dunno, Marsh,” he said. Looking tired. “I dunno.”
I had gotten everything I could out of the old guy. Now I needed to keep moving. If I could break one little detail, maybe I could trade it in. For my own future.